


Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands

by strangeallure



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Character Turned Into a Ghost, F/M, Gothic, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Time Travel, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-17 07:46:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17556242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeallure/pseuds/strangeallure
Summary: After her death, Vanessa Ives has become a ghost lost in time, an impotent observer of her own failures. When she revisits her encounters with Dr. Alexander Sweet, she is moved to reevaluate her past, revealing a choice she has yet left to make.





	Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yujacheong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yujacheong/gifts).



> Title from “Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Her death should have been the end of it. The end of a life filled to the brim with pain and betrayal, with sin-stained thoughts and jealous secrets, chasing after mind-numbing pleasures and an absent god by turns.

Instead, the death of Vanessa Ives reveals itself to be a commencement, an unholy conversion from substance into emptiness.

She’s a phantasm now, invisible, less than an apparition. So ethereal as to be nothing, yet lacking the comfort of oblivion.

In her final moments, she’d been gathered in the arms of the man she knew as Ethan Chandler, the moody shine of a myriad candles surrounding them like a flickering halo, Vanessa’s immaculate gown an echo of baptism and blessed union, even as it was stained in her own blood. Wounded not by a spear, but by a bullet she herself had implored him to fire.

“Oh Ethan, I see our Lord,” she had whispered, eyes unfocused and limbs lax.

Her last words an act of mercy.

He had life ahead of him still. He needed something to hold on to, a credo by which to bind himself into the shape of a man.

In truth, Vanessa had seen nothing.

No light and no darkness; no shadow and no sun. An absence so intense it should have been blinding, but instead it left her hollow.

She had been drained out of her body on a stream of fading sensations: the last pulse of her blood, the last breath from her lungs, the last sting of pain in her abdomen as she bled to death, the curious sharpness of fatal damage almost piercing the veil of quiet that had descended upon her.

And just as she seemed to disintegrate, to translate herself into a language without words, she remade herself. Reshaped herself from memories and time, from a past where she would dwell.

It was chaos at first: years amalgamated into mere minutes, seconds stretched into seasons. Once time had contracted and expanded and rediscovered its true form, Vanessa gained a foothold on the world as it had been. Tenuous, but no more so than any she had had in life.

\--

Vanessa stands yet doesn’t. An invisible presence in a time long past.

She observes herself as a child, playing with Mina and Peter in their sunroom, gluing mirrors behind glass eyes she puts inside dead animals’ skulls to make their eyes spark.

“You have to name a thing before it comes to life, Mina,” she lectures as she prepares the hawk, and her ghostly heart aches with the easy familiarity of friendship, “like a witch’s spell.”

Her non-corporeal hand glides through her best friend’s face, and her tears never touch the ground.

\--

She stumbles through the past without aim, falling between days and memories until an unseen hand holds on, anchoring her to a tangible time and place.

Ballantree Moor.

An older Vanessa Ives, a young woman still, but marked by sin and sorrow, stands in front the Cut-Wife’s house, a tree bent behind her like gallows, autumn winds whipping her hair against the skin of her face.

The Cut-Wife’s wards, ancient magic she has yet to learn, won’t allow Vanessa to trespass, so she takes root outside, unwavering, through rain and storm and night, until all powder and paint, all artifice, is struck off her features, her complexion pale to the point of translucence, the sturdy fabric of her clothes the only thing setting her apart from the ghost standing by, watching.

Even in her spectral form, Vanessa feels the thrill when the Cut-Wife calls her strong-willed and agile, like the scorpion.

Vanessa had loved Mina; she had loved her parents, too, in spite of the torment disguised as modern medicine they had submitted her to: water cures, isolation therapy, brain surgery; but that day, beaten by the gales of the west country, a blood symbol on her forehead and a strange woman’s hand clawed around her neck, was the first time she had felt truly seen, understood in her essence.

The apparition’s invisible lips curve. It is good to see Joan Clayton again. Those were harsh times on the moor, filled with hard-won learning and arduous labor, but with a sense of belonging, too, of true kinship. Something that had been much too rare in Vanessa’s life.

She observes a whole season of lessons and camaraderie before she is swept away again, leaving her younger self to make the same choices and mistakes all over again.

\--

She’s in a small, white room with padded walls.

If the apparition still possessed a physical form, it would sweat in anguish and agony, would throw up bile to burn her throat from within. As it is, she can only observe, a useless presence sent through time without plan or meaning.

Her younger self lies on a bed, her face and body marked by months of torment at the hands of self-purported healers, subject and victim of modern medical progress.

She looks barely alive, hair stringy, cheeks hollow and eyes dim in black sockets.

 _Please_ , she thinks, _don’t let me go through this again. I cannot bear witness to my own undoing. I cannot endure._

There is no answer to her plea, no mercy. Just days upon days without nights, filled with monotony and random suffering.

By the time Vanessa melts away into another moment, there is so little left of her younger self that the apparition wonders how she could ever appear to be whole again, if only from the outside.

\--

The specter finds herself again much later, sitting by Joan Clayton’s bed in that crooked house on the moor, holding the witch’s hand. She recognizes that night by candlelight, remembers the ache in her bones as she realized her friend and mentor was going to die.

But before the Cut-Wife dies, she will make Vanessa a gift; a beautiful, terrible gift.

 _The Poetry of Death_ , the Verbis Diabolo.

The book lies on Joan’s lap like a fat, leather-skinned cat, but her eyes are on the young woman in front of her as she foretells a future Vanessa now knows shall come to pass.

“If ever the day comes when my little scorpion is crushed and beaten, if her God deserts her completely, only then does she open it.” The softness in her voice is rare, and it soothes both the woman it is directed at and her unseen doppelganger. “And on that day, she will never be the same. She will have gone away from God forever.”

Even then, the ghost understands now, the words reverberate in her body as prophesy, not as a warning.

She watches her past self’s head rest on the witch’s chest, letting her hair be stroked like a child’s, as she disintegrates into another time.

\--

She’s in the Murray’s sunroom again, but she’s a child no longer.

The specter feels a deep sadness when she recognizes the scene, fortifies herself against seeing it play out all over again.

Young Vanessa shouldn’t even be here, not at night, not the day before Mina’s wedding. The space is filled with lightning and moonlight and the panted breaths of a man Vanessa doesn’t love. He pushes into her against the taxidermy table she is spread out upon, the hawk’s wing moving above her head in time with his deep thrusts, birds of prey rattling on their mounts, her moans too loud for the quiet house and the door she knows to be ajar.

Vanessa’s spirit watches Mina come in, sees her looking on, the shock and betrayal on her face hardening into a mask. Finally, she catches Vanessa’s eye when it strays from Mina’s fiancé. A lifelong bond is ripped apart in a drawn-out wordless moment.

Years later she will speak to Mina again on a bleak day by a roiling sea, but her best friend will be the dragon’s by then.

At least in her noncorporeal state, she can stay by Mina’s side, invisible. See Mina be taken care of; see her heal, she prays; see her, maybe, a wild hope in a non-existent chest, see her forgive Vanessa, if only in the slightest of measures, before the dragon transforms her into a blood eater.

But there are no new mercies in this ghostly existence, and so Vanessa feels herself lose touch with this particular past, disappearing into the maelstrom of time.

\--

She’s older when she reemerges, mere months before her death. A lost and abandoned creature. The men she thought to be her family, those she had relied upon and who had relied upon her, are off on their own crusades in foreign lands, leaving Vanessa alone in London, perishing in body and spirit just like the mansion decaying around her.

It feels like yet another punishment, to be confronted with the filth on the ground and the grease in her own hair, to see her own dull eyes wide in the constant dark of drawn curtains and boarded-up windows, her dirty fingernails digging into a loaf of bread she tears apart with her teeth.

Her silent plea to disappear goes unfulfilled, and so she has to witness days turning into weeks as the house and its dweller waste away. She’s nothing but an impotent shadow, much like the woman before her.

Only when Ferdinand Lyle calls and advises Vanessa to visit Dr. Seward, the mental doctor with the face of a dead witch, does the apparition feel herself break away and dissolve.

\--

Days later, the ghost finds herself in the halls of the Natural History Museum.

She notices the eager shine in her younger self’s eyes, so different from her earlier aspect, unclouded, clear.

The Vanessa with blood pumping in her veins and breath animating her future corpse quickly climbs the stairs to the gallery in anticipation of _him_. Soft and gentle Dr. Sweet with his artless, charming chatter, full of sympathy and admiration for dark and dangerous creatures.

 _What a fool she had been._ Taken in by the dragon, willingly following him, pursuing him, even, into his own lair.

Yet as the scene unfolds, she feels no malice from him, no falseness. Her dead, immaterial eyes are opened to the truth, yet she cannot see what she knows must be there.

Instead she is charmed all over by his humility and enthusiasm, by his wide-eyed talk of adventurers and heroes. His interest in her seems so genuine – not just in her body, she is accustomed to that – but in her mind. Asking questions, admitting doubt, listening and engaging with her as an equal.

She tells herself that it’s all manipulation, a powerful monster posing as a harmless man. His aim to make her trust him, rely on him, and ultimately submit to him. The pat explanation doesn’t ring true, unlike the rare laugh – soft, unburdened – he draws from the beaten-down woman in front of him.

\--

She skips out of time again and finds that it saddens her not to linger with this woman slowly finding herself again, daring to place her hope and trust in this humble man. She longs to be there during their first rendezvous, when she savored his delight at the story of Captain Nemo, brought to life in moving pictures. She wants to revisit the first time he kissed her: not on the lips, but on the hand; chaste, reverent. She yearns to follow the two of them into that hall of mirrors in Limehouse, pulling faces and laughing like children.

There was deception, yes, but deep inside her invisible heart she knows that she would never have let him in otherwise, and that her life would have been poorer for it.

\--

Gradually, she learns to accept her fate, makes peace with the knowledge that she has no control over her progress through time. Sometimes, she glides along many consecutive days and even weeks of her past, watching herself complete the most mundane tasks. Sometimes, she rushes and tumbles forwards and backwards in time in frenzied bursts. One shameful occurrence after another, her ruinous choices and glaring inadequacies thrown into sharp relief by experiencing them consecutively in the span of mere hours, sometimes moments.

And then the rules seem to be altered. For the first time, her journey brings her to places, scenes she does not remember, giving her insight into the lives of the people she knew and loved, the people she died for.

She sees Ethan maul and kill people. Criminals and innocents alike, month after month when the moon is at its fullest, leaving a swath of destruction across continents. _The Wolf of God._ Suddenly, the words echo with mockery.

She is there, too, ethereal but watchful, on the wide planes of Africa and in the small villages, when Sir Malcolm Murray uses and rapes and kills those he deems to be savages. When he leaves his only son, sick and afraid, to die alone in a dirty tent, unwilling to give up his search for the source of the river Nile. His own legend more important to him than his own child.

She witnesses Victor trying to bring a dead man back to life, making the creature howl in pain as it writhes helplessly in its own bodily fluids, only to abandon the corpse without care or dignity when his experiment fails. She witnesses, too, when the creature claws its way back into the space between living and dead things, full of pain and physical strength, but without memory or guidance. How, years later, Dr. Victor Frankenstein suffocates his friend’s beloved so he can reanimate her corpse and make a bride for his creature.

And she sees Dorian, again and again and again, user and abuser of people, manipulator and murderer. Without rhyme or reason, he discards friends and foes alike, even those who admired, loved and trusted him, delivering each killing blow with practiced ease and a charming smile. None of his deeds leaving so much as a trace of guilt or regret on his face or in his demeanor.

Were any of them worth saving? Are any of them truly worth more than the night creatures they abhor and reject. Those who have been waiting patiently – meekly – in the shadows for so long?

Alexander Sweet’s words echo through her essence, speaking to a truth deep within: “All the broken and shunned creatures. Someone's got to care for them. Who shall it be, if not us?“

 _The meek, they shall inherit the earth._ Maybe she had been right to give her flesh and blood to the dragon. Maybe her final sacrifice had been her true mistake.

\--

When Vanessa’s ghost finds her footing in her own past again, she is back where she first met innocent and duplicitous Dr. Alexander Sweet. The Natural History Museum.

It’s late, visitors and staff long gone, and he shows her the exhibits for their upcoming _House of the Night Creatures_ : nocturnal animals in all their variation and beauty, mounted and preserved to be admired by those that would otherwise recoil from them.

With the knowledge she possesses now, she has to admire how carefully he chooses his words, how he conceals what she has yet to learn with truths more soothing than any lie. How he affirms her fears instead of dismissing them, even as he awakens her sympathy for creatures whom god had cast into darkness and cursed to the night, who feed off blood because they must.

When he speaks the words she can never forget – “Vanessa, I love you for who you are, not who the world wants you to be.” – she cannot help but believe him.

Soon they’re on the floor, his body pressing hers down as he lavishes her cleavage with kisses, but when she moves to turn them around, he goes willingly, relinquishing his hold so she can take him the way she wants to.

The specter sees, relishes the desire on her own face as her body bends back on top of him, but there’s something else in her mortal features, something that won’t allow her to drown in that sea of sensation, withholding from her the full wealth of her pleasure.

A flash of recognition, of comprehension jolts through the invisible threads the apparition is made of, setting alight unseen nerve-endings.

It’s Vanessa herself, antediluvian ideas poisoning the well within her _._

_This is wrong, hedonistic, sinful. A pious woman would never allow this outside of her marriage bed. A good woman wouldn’t get lost in her desire like this. No-one should crave the flesh of another with such fervor._

Even as she takes him inside her, as she rolls her hips and clenches around him, this living Vanessa cannot look Dr. Sweet in the eyes. She feels wicked, tainted; haunted by the leitmotif that has echoed, rippled through all of her life: “ _You are weak. You are guilty. You are impure. You are undeserving of mercy, of grace, of happiness, of love.”_

A sense of compulsion overcomes the spirit, luring her closer and closer to her past self, until she can feel the heat of her own body against the invisible gossamer of her essence. She’s drawn ever closer, no longer willing to observe the past, but desperate to touch it, to fuse with it. She can hear her own pulse in the other Vanessa’s neck, can almost smell the dragon in her, in her blood. It should be vile, pestilent, like a disease polluting her bloodstream, but it is milk and honey instead, warmth and recognition. Something about him sings to her, reverberates through time and space.

The compulsion intensifies, tearing at her. A bond like an umbilical cord, linking flesh and spirit, life and death, drawing her lost soul back into her past body.

She should doubt but she cannot as she drifts closer and closer, until phantom and flesh overlap, until she can feel skin tingling and nerves firing again, muscles tensing and relaxing. With a painful snap, everything contracts. Her head seems to expand, her bones about to burst, but just when she knows she must shatter, her vision clears.

Vanessa Ives is back in the world of the living, back in her past and her own body. The dragon between her thighs, body flooded with sensation and desire.

A miracle. A gift of possibilities. She alone has the power now: to change the past, chose a different way, a different ending. A happier one.

She has been ruled, reined in, by society, by guilt, by god, for so long.

 _No more_ , Vanessa vows. She is done with the shackles of faith, doctrine and decorum. No longer shall she be contained. She will feel everything her body has to offer and do it without shame. She will revel and relish. She will live deep, suck life dry to the bone and feast on its marrow.

As her resolve solidifies, a preternatural calm, an all-embracing understanding, settles upon her.

She knows now why the dragon needs more than day could ever offer. Darkness expands in ways light cannot. It fills every crevice, envelops all, promises comfort and danger alike.

The dragon wants, needs, a different kind of love, complete and all-consuming. One that can only take root in the fertile soil of the dark, where it won’t be scorched and burnt away, where it can grow, fester, in the dim light of the oil lamp and the candle.

Day and its creatures have ruled this earth for too long. They have hidden their cruelty, their depravity, under fair masks and golden lights, have condemned and accused the night for their own sins and failings.

It is time for the dark to emerge, to rule, smother everything in shadows like a merciful mother would a sickly child. The night needs to gorge on radiance, devour until it feeds on time itself.

This is the future she will command. Vanessa Ives, Ruler of Dark Things.

And she will do it with him. By her side – or under her boot.

Dr. Alexander Sweet. Dracula. The dragon.

She takes his skull in her hands and pierces his eyes with hers.

“I know who you are,” she grits out, obliterating the past, shattering her own memories of what is to come.

His gaze is steady, but his hands tighten around her thighs. He doesn’t insult her by feigning ignorance, doesn’t say even one word as he awaits her judgement.

“Will you love me?” she asks, her voice rich with menace.

“Yes,” he breathes.

“Will you obey me?”

“Yes.”

“Will you rule with me?”

There is only one answer, one oath.

“Yes.”

The words well up inside her from a primordial place: “Then all light will end and the world will live in darkness. The very air will be pestilence to mankind.” A smile burns bright on her face, fatal and serene. “And then our brethren, the night creatures, will emerge and feed. Such is our power, such is our kingdom.”

“Such is my kiss,” he pledges, revealing sharp teeth to bite into her flesh, bestowing pain and pleasure in equal measure, linking their blood. She can feel the rhythm of his power throbbing through her body, and all that remains is completing the circle.

“Our kingdom come,” she whispers, and bites into his neck.

**Author's Note:**

> Like all my stories, this is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), whose goal is to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites:
> 
>  **Feedback** : short comments, long comments, questions, constructive criticism, "<3" as extra kudos, reader-reader interaction
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